Harry Potter fans are finally going to see the much-awaited film, which opens at cinemas in the UK and US on Friday and looks set to break box office records.

Advance ticket sales in the UK have already topped the £1m mark, with the Odeon cinema group dedicating nearly half of its total 599 cinema screens to showing the film.

US takings are widely expected to top the previous opening weekend box office record of $72m (£50m) set by Jurassic Park II: The Lost World in 1997.

Such is the US demand to be the first to see the movie that midnight screenings have been arranged.

Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone, as the film is known in the US, is showing in some 3,500 cinemas nationally.

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It had its Los Angeles première on Wednesday.

Compared with its gala screenings in London and New York, it turned out to be a low-key affair as the only British cast member to put in an appearance was John Cleese.

The comic actor, who plays the ghost Nearly Headless Nick in the adaptation of JK Rowling's first bestselling book, has a home in the States.

Other actors, such as Dame Maggie Smith, Richard Harris and Alan Rickman stayed away, along with the child stars of the movie.

"This film is creating a rare phenomenon in the industry and expectations are very high," said a Warner Brothers spokesman.

The Senator Theater in Baltimore, Maryland, was so inundated with requests for early showings it decided it would be ahead of the pack by screening it at midnight.

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"For months and months, we've been receiving calls about when the first opportunity to see Harry Potter will be, and we realised many of these calls were from adults. It's
an eight-to-80 thing," said cinema owner Tom Kiefaber.

As if to illustrate Kiefaber's point, the oldest and youngest actors in the film have spoken of their roles in the most glowing terms.